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Linguistics Theory, Foundations, and Modern Development

An Overview of Linguistics and Linguistic Applications

Linguistic Assumptions and Principles

Parts of Grammars

Morphology

Morphology is the arbitrary assignment of meaning to valid phonemes. Phonemes are the smallest unit of sound available in a language; these will be covered more thoroughly in the section on phonology. "[Knowledge of] a word means knowing both how to pronounce it and its meaning" [Fromkin and Rodman, 35]. While assignment of a string of sounds to a meaning and vice-versa make a word, for it to be meaningful, the string of sounds still has to follow the linguistic rules of the language (one reason that most speakers of one tongue "massacre" other tongues with their native accent). It must also be generally accepted. I cannot reason that the word "dinosaur" means "the lowest color on the visible spectrum," because the word "dinosaur" already has a meaning and the meaning "the lowest color on the visible spectrum" is represented by several words, most notably "red." Certainly, if enough people used "dinosaur" to mean the color we know as "red," then "dinosaur" would take on the meaning of "red" in addition to "thunder lizard."

A googol
A perfect example is the word "googol" which means "1 followed by 100 zeros (10^100)." This word was coined in 1955 by the nine-year-old nephew of Dr. Edward Kasner, an American mathematician. While the concept was there to be named, there was no single word to refer to the numerical concept before then. Not all speakers of English know the word, but it is generally accepted and used by an entire class of English speakers [Fromkin and Rodman, 36]. If only one person used the word, however, it would be without valid meaning. One's internal lexicon associates many things with a word. The spelling ("orthography"), the sound ("phonology"), the syntactic class ("grammatical category," i.e., verb, noun, preposition, etc.), as well as multiple meanings (denotative, connotative, and personal).

Within the syntactic classes of words, we will find that some words are added, removed, even changed in usage or meaning. In English, these are the nouns, verbs, adverbs, and adjectives, which make up the largest part of vocabulary. These words are considered the "content" or "open class" words, because they provide meaning to the language and change often. Other words, such as personal pronouns, prepositions, articles, and conjunctions are considered "function" or "closed class" words because they do not provide meaning, but reference, and they rarely change [Fromkin and Rodman, 38-39].

As stated earlier, morphology is the knowledge of the rules by which new words are added to a language. Most of the time they are not coined, as "googol" was, but are extensions or combinations of morphemes (the most elemental unit of grammatical form) [Fromkin and Rodman, 41]. Morphemes are often, but not always represented by a single syllable (such as a + mor + al and un + lady + like). (Syllables will be covered more thoroughly under phonology.) While some of them are "root" meanings (such as mor, from mores, and lady), others are prefix (a, meaning "without" or un, meaning "not") or suffix (al, meaning "characterized by" or like, meaning "characteristic of") modifiers. Although not present in English, some languages have "infix" morphemes (which are inserted into other "whole" morphemes) and "circumfix" morphemes (in which both prefix and suffix are required to complete the morpheme) [Fromkin and Rodman, 41-45].

Root (or "stem") morphemes may be bound or free. A free morpheme might be "boy," "aardvark," or any other word. However, some root morphemes are bound to other root morphemes, such as "huckle + berry." While you will find "berry" by itself, you will never find "huckle" used as a word, because it only has meaning when attached to the morpheme "berry" [Fromkin and Rodman, 45-47].

Sometimes, there is a "lexical gap," where a meaning is needed but no word exists. Sometimes, as with "googol," new words (or morphemes!) are coined, but there are several ways to "create" new words within a language. The first is "derivational morphology," which is the combination of specific ("derivational") morphemes to other morphemes to create, or derive, new words. Many times, this will involve a change in grammatical class (such as the noun "boy" combined with the derivational morpheme "ish" to form the adjective "boyish"), but this is not necessarily the case (such as "semi" + "annual" or "pun" + "ster"). Not all derivational morphemes are applicable to all words (such as "Commun" + "ist" and not "ite" or "ian" which are other morphemes used to identify members of a group). Thus, derivational morphology is the application of the knowledge of which afix morphemes can be added to which root morphemes and words. (Our knowledge of all of the rules is not complete by any means, however, as is shown by Amsel Greene's book Pullet Surprises, published in 1969.)

Words may be coined in a variety of ways. Sometimes they are created for a specific purpose, such as Kodak, Jell-O, and other "brand names." At other times, two words (not morphemes) may be combined to form other words, such as "bittersweet," "pickpocket," and other compound words. To further confuse things, "the meaning of a compound is not always the sum of the meanings of its parts; a blackboard may be green or white" [Fromkin and Rodman, 54]. All languages have rules for forming compounds by joining words. Acronyms, formed by taking the initials of several words (such as "NASA") from National Aeronautics and Space Agency, are another form of word coinage (although not all of them are pronounceable as words, such as "UCLA" from University of California, Los Angeles). Sometimes, words are conjoined in such a way that part of one or more of the words are elided, or blended, such as "smog" from "smoke + fog" [Fromkin and Rodman, 55-57]. Other common words are "back-formed," or the removal of common affixes from words that did not originally have them, such as "peddle" from "peddler" [Fromkin and Rodman, 57-58]. Sometimes, abbreviations are lexicalized ("phone," "bus," and others) in a process called "clipping" [Fromkin and Rodman, 58]. At even other times, proper nouns become lexicalized, such as "sandwich," "jumbo," and other words (1500 of which are compiled in Willard R. Espy's book, O Thou Improper, Thou Uncommon Noun: An Etymology of Words That Once Were Names, published in 1978) [Fromkin and Rodman, 58].

Most importantly, it is important to note that all morphemes have grammatical structure attached to them. Sometimes, the grammatical meaning is only apparent when combined with other morphemes (as affixes may modify the grammatical meaning). Inflectional morphemes are those morphemes which have no meaning outside of the grammatical meaning, such as the pluralizing 's' in English. Other morphemes have exceptions, or suppletive forms, such as hit/hit (present/past) or sheep/sheep (singular/plural) [Fromkin and Rodman, 59-63].

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